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The Way We Live Now: 3-12-00: On Language; Iron Triangle

On the eve of his victory in the South Carolina primary, recalling his stunning defeat in New Hampshire, George W. Bush said: ''People may not think I'm tough enough, but I am. This is a process of steeling me to become president.''

Newsweek, reporting on the ''hardening'' of the candidate during the rough tactics of that Southern campaign, commented, ''Consider him steeled.''

The verb, in its sense of ''to make hard or strong as steel,'' is used in Shakespeare's poem ''Venus and Adonis,'' as Venus says: ''Give me my heart. . . . O give it me, lest thy hard heart do steel it,/And being steeled, soft sighs can never grave it.'' Governor Bush, in subsequent interviews, repeated the verb; he evidently felt that being steeled is an admirable development in a candidate.

Senator John McCain is also partial to a metallic metaphor. ''I've taken on the iron triangle: special interests, campaign finance and lobbying,'' he said in mid-February. A few weeks earlier, his definition was formulated slightly differently: ''The establishment obviously is in a state of extreme distress, if not panic, because they know I have taken on the iron triangle of money, lobbyists and legislation.''

The origin is military. On United States Army maps during the Korean conflict of 1950-53, an area about 30 miles north of the 38th parallel with its apex at Pyongyang and its corners at Chorwon and Kumhwa was marked ''the Iron Triangle.'' This was the center anchor of the North Korean defense line and the hub of a communication and supply network. During the Vietnam War, an area of 125 square miles northwest of Saigon was called by the same name. Then the phrase was transferred to Europe and used for nations rather than small areas: in 1977, an editorial in The New York Times called East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia ''the U.S.S.R.'s iron triangle.''

Meanwhile, the military phrase was being used as a synonym for what Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell, called ''the military-industrial complex'' -- that is, the military services, defense contractors and members of Congress busy at the pork barrel. In the 70's, the term spread beyond the military to include the cozy relationship among federal agencies, Congressional committees and lobbyists.

Ronald Reagan, as he was leaving office, substituted the media for the military in his triangulation. ''A triangle of institutions -- parts of Congress, the media and special-interest groups -- is transforming and placing out of focus our constitutional balance,'' Reagan warned. Modestly, he did not claim credit for the phrase: ''Some have used the term iron triangle to describe what I'm talking about.''

McCain left the media out of his iron triangle, substituting ''money,'' so that his three corners are now ''money, lobbyists and legislation.''

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How did his opponent deal with the three-sided ferrous metaphor? George W. Bush's department of figure-of-speech ripostes did fairly well. Another sense of triangle is ''an iron rod bent in a triangle with one angle open, used as a percussion instrument or bell when struck with another iron rod.''

After being asked frequently about McCain's symbol, he was readied with a colorful reply. ''If a man says, for example,'' said Bush, undoubtedly alluding to the man as McCain, ''that there's an iron triangle in Washington, D.C., of lobbyists and special interests, and he's ringing it like a dinner bell to raise money for his campaign, I think that I have a right to point out that he says one thing and does another.''

Although Bush's triangle had only two sides, his word-image nicely brought to mind a picture of an iron triangle used sometimes on Texas ranches to call cowhands to dinner.

What is it about iron that attracts phrase makers? John C. Calhoun, vice president under Andrew Jackson, was nicknamed ''the cast-iron man'' by the English economist Harriet Martineau because he ''looks as if he had never been born, and could never be extinguished.'' Lou Gehrig, the ''iron horse'' (originally referring to the railroads), was followed by Cal Ripken, the ''iron man,'' who broke Gehrig's endurance record of 2,130 consecutive games in 1995.

But there is a cruel connotation to the word-image. Blood and iron, in German Blut und Eisen, meant ''military force as distinguished from diplomacy'' and was associated in the 1870's with Prince Bismarck, ''the iron chancellor.'' Autocratic rule was governance with an iron hand. Churchill famously called the Soviet separation of the tyrannized East and the free West the iron curtain, after a fireproof curtain used in French and English theaters as early as the 18th century. (The Viscountess Snowden, after a visit to Russia soon after World War I, wrote, ''We were behind the 'iron curtain' at last!'') In the United States, the undemonstrative first lady Rosalynn Carter was derogated (unfairly, in retrospect) as ''the steel magnolia.'' The iron rice bowl was Mao Zedong's guarantee to China's workers of a job for life under the Communist system, with cradle-to-grave benefits. President Bill Clinton, celebrating what he believed was the emergence of capitalism in China, said in 1998 that ''restructuring state enterprises is critical to building a modern economy, but it is also disrupting settled patterns of life and work, cracking the iron rice bowl.''

Thus, McCain's iron triangle has a built-in pejorative connotation. Even the triangle has dark memories, as its evocation in necromancy and in the military usages above indicates. There's also the Bermuda Triangle, where boats disappear mysteriously, as well as the golden triangle, the area of Southeast Asia -- Myanmar, Laos and Thailand -- where opium is cultivated. (On the other hand, people in rejuvenated downtown Pittsburgh, and Texans in the Beaumont-Orange-Port Arthur area, are happy to call their neighborhoods the golden triangle.)